US: Kenneth Lee Boyd, a Vietnam veteran who murdered his estranged wife and her father, is set today to become the 1,000th person executed in the United States since the death penalty was restored in 1976.
Protesters gathered yesterday outside the prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Boyd was being held as his lawyers pleaded with federal courts and the state's governor Mike Easley to call off the execution.
A district court judge said this week that Boyd "has a nearly nonexistent likelihood of success" in the courts and Mr Easley was not expected to grant clemency.
In a prison interview with the Associated Press this week, Boyd described the death penalty as "nothing but revenge" and said he did not want to be its 1,000th subject. "I don't like the idea of being picked as a number. I feel like I should be in prison for the rest of my life," he said.
Boyd admits killing Julie Curry Boyd and her father, Thomas Dillard Curry, in 1988 but claims that he remembers little about it.
"I remember sitting in my house, nobody there," he said. "I blinked my eyes and I'd done shot my father-in-law. When they told me how many times I shot her, I couldn't believe it. It's just a thing that happened, just snapped."
Virginia governor Mark Warner this week commuted a death sentence on Robin Lovitt, a convicted murderer due to be the 1,000th person executed since the return of the death penalty.
Mr Warner, expected to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, said the improper destruction of evidence - including a scissors used in the murder - meant that Lovitt's defence team could not use DNA testing to show his innocence.
In California, governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will decide next week if Stanley Tookie Williams, founder of Los Angeles's notorious Crips gang, should be executed on December 13th.
After his 1981 conviction for four murders, Williams underwent a transformation in prison, becoming an anti-gang activist and writing a number of books for children. He has always protested his innocence. Celebrities including rapper Snoop Dogg, actor Jamie Foxx and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have campaigned to have his life spared.
Mr Schwarzenegger said he would meet Williams's lawyers and the prosecutors next Thursday.
The US Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that state laws to reform capital punishment were valid, ending a 10-year moratorium on the death penalty. Two out of three Americans favour the penalty for premeditated murder.
Thirty-eight states allow it but executions have become fewer in recent years, falling from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 59 last year. By yesterday, 55 people had been executed in the US this year.